We also require an approach for modelling the spatial distribution of relative wind speeds within a footprint at each time step of a windstorm. In theory many different spatial processes could be used, but a natural class of models to consider is Gaussian processes, which are widely used in geostatistics [1]}, [2]}, [3]} to model spatial data as they are simple to use and parsimonious. A Gaussian process describes the joint distribution of random variables over a continuous domain such as space inside a footprint, while for any finite collection of locations in the space the variables follow a multivariate Gaussian distribution.
